Thousands of Afghan civilians have been killed by NATO bombs and botched operations. On May 4 American bombers killed nearly 150 civilians in Farah province, and in September nearly 100 civilians were killed by US bombs in Kunduz province as they tried to salvage fuel from a tanker damaged in an insurgent attack. Even Hamid Karzai has demanded the Americans find a way to end the weekly slaughter of dozens of civilians in misdirected airstrikes.

On April 9, US troops raided a house and killed a woman, her 17 year-old daughter, her 15 year-old son and her brother-in-law. The military propaganda machine immediately went into action, claiming the four people killed were "armed militants," and there the matter would have rested, had it not been the fact that the Americans had, in fact, wiped out the family of a prominent Afghan army commander.

So far, the eight-year war in Afghanistan has not led to killing on quite the industrial scale seen during invasion and occupation of Iraq where hundreds of thousands of civilians died. But this is mainly because under George Bush, Afghanistan was the forgotten war. Barack Obama came to power promising to change all that. Afghan civilians have since discovered good reasons to fear his message of "change."

Meanwhile the misery caused by the US invasion of Iraq will continue for generations. Doctors in Fallujah are reporting 15 times the normal number of birth defects in infants, and a sharp increase in cancers among children. They fear a link between the abnormalities and the terror weapons, including white phosphorous and napalm, used by US forces in their assault on the city five years ago.

"Young women in Fallujah are terrified of having children because of the increasing number of babies born grotesquely deformed, with no heads, two heads, a single eye in their foreheads, scaly bodies or missing limbs. In addition, young children in Fallujah are now experiencing hideous cancers and leukemias," says a letter sent by a group of prominent British doctors and intellectuals and the former Iraqi minister for women's affairs (2006-2009) to the United Nations on October 12.

Lest we forget, the Americans destroyed the city of Fallujah in 2004 in reprisal for the killing of four US mercenaries from the private security firm Blackwater. It was, in the eyes of many, an act of collective punishment reminiscent of Nazi barbarism during World War II.

If President Obama were really serious about defeating Islamist terrorism he would announce his clear intention to both disastrous wars started by George W Bush, and devote his energies to solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the other great recruiting sergeant for the militants.

Instead Obama has escalated the Afghan conflict into Pakistan, where US drones kill civilians on an almost daily basis, driving a whole new generation of young men into the ranks of the Taliban. Meanwhile the administration repeatedly humiliated the pro-American Palestinian President Abbas; first pressuring him to withhold support from the Goldstone report on Gaza, then dropping the requirement for a freeze on Israeli settlements as a precondition for negotiations. The final straw came when Hilary Clinton praised the "restraint" shown by the extreme-rightwing Netanyahu government. Abbas announced he would not stand for re-election as Palestinian president, leaving American policy in tatters.

Although Obama has changed the tone and softened the rhetoric of US foreign policy, he has not fundamentally changed its disastrous neo-conservative trajectory. America is beyond help in the Afghanistan/Pakistan quagmire it has created. With peacekeepers supporting UN missions in 10 countries, China is already pulling its weight as a responsible global power, but it should have no truck with US wars.